Hard disc drive systems (HDDs) typically include one or more data storage discs and one or more sliders, each of which contains transducing heads that are used to read from and write to a data track on a corresponding disc media. The transducing heads and sliders are typically produced by a thin film based wafer process followed by an air-bearing surface process. In a typical slider manufacturing process, a wafer loaded with already-formed transducing heads is sliced into rectangular shaped chunks that are then sliced into rows or bars, each containing a number of transducing heads (e.g., 64 heads). The sliced surfaces of the bars are then subjected to various lapping steps. The fully lapped and surface patterned bars are eventually diced to form individual sliders. During the lapping, multiple row bars are mounted on tooling and lapped simultaneously for operational efficiency. In order to obtain accurate lapping of the multiple bars, each of these multiple bars should be measured and sorted with close or similar physical dimensions prior to the lapping process.
The present invention provides a system and device for quickly and accurately measuring the dimensions of the slider row bars.